


Adrift

by A_Diamond



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alien Castiel (Supernatural), Alternate Universe - Space, Colonization, Dean/Cas Reverse Bang, First Contact, Isolation, M/M, MCD not Dean or Cas, Pre-Slash, Spaceships, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 20:06:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15008429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Diamond/pseuds/A_Diamond
Summary: Dean Winchester left Earth with his parents twenty-five years ago aboard the colony shipSt. Louis. Three years into the five-year journey, a freak energy wave decimated the ship’s inhabitants, cut off their communication with Earth, and destroyed their navigation system. Now, Dean and his best friend Jimmy are one of the teams who fly out to survey potential planets for habitability.Dean’s pretty sure they’re not going to find one in his lifetime.When something goes wrong on what should be a routine survey mission, Dean has to face Jimmy’s death, the existence of extraterrestrial life, and the truth about what killed his parents—all while trapped in a broken shuttle with an alien life form that’s taken over his friend’s corpse.





	Adrift

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Starmouse123](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starmouse123/gifts).



> Please be sure to go throw your love all over Starmouse123's [art post](http://starmouse123.tumblr.com/post/175146649400/adrift-ii-dcrb-2018-ii-art-dean-winchester-left), which is the inspiration behind this story! I was ready to knife people at claims over this one, it's really such a perfect telling of a story all on its own.
> 
> Jojo and muse, you're still the best.

Dean dropped haphazardly into the shuttle’s co-pilot chair, ending up a little sideways since he didn’t bother looking away from the infopad in his hand. Enough of his ass landed in the right place for him to stay in the seat, but his partner looked over and snorted at him anyway. Dean flicked a rude gesture in Jimmy’s direction and kept reading.

The planet of the day was smaller than the ones they usually investigated, only about half of Earth’s size, but it was the first one they’d found in the new system and it had a large, close moon that could potentially give them more to work with. It didn’t look like much on screen, but that was probably down to the fact that all they knew about it was size and distance.

That was the whole point of their mission, after all: to fly out to distant exoplanets that the _St. Louis_ couldn’t reach with its limited scanning systems and survey them for habitability. He and Jimmy had been doing it for years. He cynically thought they would keep doing it for years, probably for the rest of their lives, with just as little to show for it. The expedition had been trying to find a candidate for colonization for most of his life, but terrestrial planets weren’t exactly easy to come by, especially when they were more or less guessing which ones to send teams to.

Jimmy, on the other hand, clapped him on the shoulder and announced, “This might be the one.”

Rolling his eyes, Dean shut off the pad. “They all might be the one,” he said, settling more normally into his seat. “None of them actually are.”

“Nah. I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Something big is gonna happen, just wait.”

“Sure, all right. If you have a good feeling about it, it must be the one. Why have we been bothering with all the other missions all these years? We should’ve just asked Jimmy Novak how he felt about them! Two decades lost, all the fuel and man-hours wasted, when all along we had an extraplanetary dowsing rod–”

Something bounced off his head, soft and light but enough to cut off his train of mocking. Without looking, he knew it had to be the small cloth replica of Earth that Jimmy always took with him when they went on planet checks. It was a superstition, but one Dean understood, especially since he remembered how tightly Jimmy had been holding it the first time Dean saw him, the day they’d both been orphaned.

He carried his dad’s flask, too, and had even before he was old enough to know what it was. It had been in John Winchester’s pocket when they reclaimed his body from the vacuum that kept most of its victims and that was enough to make it matter. At least his sentiment was practical, he thought as he pulled it from inside the neck of his suit; just water, he wasn’t stupid enough for anything harder before launch.

“Don’t you have a checklist to be checking?” Jimmy asked in the same teasing tone.

“I‘ll check your list,” Dean muttered nonsensically. Jimmy probably heard him and didn’t care, since he did in fact start going down the pre-flight equipment checks. Engines were green, all seals were airtight, comms were online, scanners were functional, and so on. Dean could run through it all in his sleep by then, but he ticked through them on his pad to satisfy command and his pilot.

After double-checking their coordinates against the mission brief, he flashed Jimmy two thumbs up. “Ready to make history, Captain.”

“Mock all you want—”

“I will! I am.”

“—and brood all you want, but I’m going to stay optimistic. And at the end of the day, my point of view has a distinct advantage over yours.”

“What’s that?”

“When it looks in the mirror, it doesn’t have to see your ugly mug.”

Dean snorted and considered throwing something back at Jimmy, but he didn’t know where the Earth toy had bounced to. Chucking his flask seemed like an uncalled-for escalation and everything else was either breakable or bolted down. “Oh please. First of all, you would be lucky to look as good as me. I’m gorgeous and you’re jealous. And second, if that were true then it would still make my perspective better because I can only see myself in reflection and you have to stare at me all day for the next week.”

“Good point. Put on your helmet.”

“Yeah, yeah.” It was next on the list, as Jimmy was well aware; he winked before fitting his own helmet over his head. “Strap in, we launch in five.”

“What if it takes me six to strap in?”

“Four.”

Two days of flight in a tiny shuttle passed about the same as they always did. Dean and Jimmy had endless hours of entertainment at their fingertips, but Dean could only sit and read or watch for so long without getting restless. His threshold for that was really abysmally low for a guy who spent as much time on survey missions as he did.

Jimmy laughed at him when he took to pacing the one short hallway in the shuttle. “You’ve been doing this for like half your life, how do you still get cabin fever?”

“Because no amount of repetition can ever make this less boring. If anything, the more we do it the more boring it gets!”

Crinkling his nose, Jimmy asked, “Is that true for everything you do? I feel so sorry for your past partners.”

While he turned to make another ten-foot march, Dean waved a dismissive hand. He didn’t need to look to see the smirk on Jimmy’s face; he had years of memories to draw from when he needed to picture it. “If you’ve received any complaints on that score, I trust you as a friend to have passed them on. That’s always a fun way to kill time.”

“Well if you’re offering,” Jimmy started but couldn’t finish. “Hm, nope. Still too ugly.”

Before he could point out again how much better looking he was than Jimmy, all the lights in the shuttle rippled green and a cheerful chime played on the speakers; the scanners had new data for them. Finally. Jimmy spun around in his chair and Dean jogged over to join him, throwing himself into his seat then awkwardly dragging an infopad out from under his ass.

“Starting to feel a gravitational pull from the planet,” Dean said. He ran some numbers from the gravity sensors—comparisons to the sun’s much more massive gravity well, the increase in force as they got minutely closer—and pushed the results to the database. “Density could be consistent with a mostly silicate composition.”

The planet stretched out one corner of the front window, rusty red and dull. They were at the wrong angle to see the moon, but the system’s sun glowed steadily to the side; not as bright as the sun on a homeworld Dean didn’t remember, but the planet was closer to it than Earth was to Sol, so that wasn’t necessarily a disqualifier. They’d spend a day or so in orbit to get readings on radiation, temperature, and atmosphere, then get core samples from a dozen locations around the planet to take back to the _St. Louis_ for more testing.

“Didn’t I tell you?” gloated Jimmy. “This is gonna be a good one. Got our orbital path?”

“Working on it.”

Dean calculated the route they’d need with what he thought was pretty impressive speed, but when he went to punch them in, he found Jimmy had already altered their course. “Come on,” he griped, “You gotta give me more time than that. And anyway, your numbers are way off.”

“What?”

“Yeah, look, this would put us...” As soon as he plotted out where it would put them, Dean grimaced and replaced them with his work. “Right into the moon. Dude, not even as a joke.”

“I didn’t put anything in.” Jimmy’s voice was uncertain; when Dean looked over, his face matched.

That was weird and concerning. Even more weird and concerning, when Dean went back to his pad he found his input gone and the path that would send them crashing into the moon’s surface back in the system. He corrected it a second time only to watch it get overwritten right before his eyes.

“Jimmy...”

But he could see that Jimmy wasn’t doing anything. He kept his hands to himself, held up in an exaggerated show of innocence, as Dean put the numbers in again. Again, the screen flashed an override and reverted. The shuttle turned, planet swinging out of view to be replaced by its moon; they’d come in past it on their way to the main planet, and it was already close enough to fill most of the front window.

“Jimmy, you—” he said as Jimmy said, “Let me—” then Dean read it out so Jimmy could make the modifications with his technically higher rank instead. The navigation system clicked back to the collision course and increased their speed.

Kept increasing their speed.

“Impact in thirty!” Or less, if the acceleration didn’t stop. It evened out a second later, at the limit of what the engines could output, and Dean revised, “Twenty.” His voice was burnt syrup in his throat, sticky and unpleasantly sour.

Jimmy lunged for the emergency beacon, but nothing happened. “Helmet,” he ordered tightly, reaching for his own. “Strap in. Brace.”

The dark, rocky moon surged up at them and they were helpless to stop it. There was no time to try anything else, but thoughts raced through Dean’s mind at the speed of light in the moments after he secured himself in the seat:

They were going to die.

He was going to die.

He was going to die like his parents, a freak accident, and Sammy would be alone. Sam wouldn’t even know something was wrong for days, until the shuttle failed to return to communication range. _St. Louis_ ’s long-range tech had never recovered from the energy surge and subsequent explosion; even new hard- and software consistently malfunctioned. The emergency signals worked a little differently and a little further out—but twice not much was still not much. And didn’t do any good if they couldn’t activate it.

“Dean—”

Dean’s vision blurred as he regained consciousness, not helped by the near-darkness of his surroundings. The only light came from the red flash of the strip of emergency lights and a pale but steadier glow from the front window, also red-tinged. Or where the front window had been; as his sight sharpened, it resolved into shattered fragments around a hole into the void.

There was no way they would be able to get her flying again. The _St. Louis_ was going to have to come collect the shuttle since they couldn’t afford to leave it scrapped.

“Jimmy?” Talking hurt, unexpectedly. He didn’t know why his throat felt rough, but he had bigger problems to worry about first: Jimmy didn’t answer, and Dean couldn’t see anything other than a vague silhouette in the shadows around the pilot’s chair. “Come on, man, wake up and help me out here.”

Ignoring the ache of what felt like a whole-body bruise, he unclipped his harness and staggered over to Jimmy, grateful that the moon’s low gravity made it a less painful stumble than it might’ve been otherwise. Then he stopped being grateful for anything at all.

Jimmy wasn’t just unconscious from the impact. The hole in his helmet wasn’t as big as the one in the ship, but it was enough. Jimmy was never waking up again.

His best friend was dead, he was alone on an unexplored, uninhabitable moon with a crippled ship, and it didn’t matter that he might have two weeks of food if the emergency stores weren’t damaged—didn’t matter that it would’ve been one week if there were two mouths to feed—because he couldn’t take his helmet off to eat them unless he found a way to seal and repressurize the shuttle. He could, probably, but he couldn’t think with Jimmy’s dead eyes just staring at him.

He fumbled for the emergency beacon, slamming his hand against the button that would send a short-wave distress call that he hoped they—hoped he was still close enough for the _St. Louis_ to pick up on, then wobbled to the airlock and managed to force open the manual override despite his trembling. Escaping onto the surface of the moon might’ve been the worst possible plan, but he needed to get out. He fled, only taking note of the rough, icy terrain to avoid running into it.

When he was far enough from Jimmy’s tomb—and maybe his, too—that he didn’t dare go any farther, he fell to his knees and concentrated on not vomiting in his helmet.

He hunched there, wracked with dry heaves, for a long, long time. No matter how many times he told himself he had to get up, had to get back to the shuttle and try to save himself, he couldn’t move. Despite his insulated suit, he was shivering uncontrollably. Shock, maybe; not a good sign, definitely. It meant he really couldn’t afford to wallow any longer, unless he wanted to be sure any rescue party only had his corpse to bring back.

Sam was next on the flight rotation. That was enough to get him on his feet: he wouldn’t make his little brother go through that if he could help it. He stood, shaky but not on the verge of collapse, and turned back to the shuttle to see what could be done—only to fall again, scrambling backward.

In the silence of a moon with no atmosphere, a figure had come up behind him unnoticed. That was startling enough. Neither the planet nor its moon had shown any life signs when they approached, no heat signatures or movement or irregular radiation that their scanners had been able to detect.

But worse, so much worse, was that it wasn’t just some alien creature. It was an impossibly familiar form:

“Jimmy?” he breathed, even knowing it couldn’t be. Jimmy was dead, killed by the hole in his helmet. The helmet that Jimmy’s body held in its hand, leaving Jimmy’s head exposed to the vacuum and not appearing to suffer for it. And Jimmy’s eyes definitely never glowed.

It shouldn’t have been able to hear him. Aside from all the reasons that a corpse shouldn’t have been walking around to hear anything, the speaker was in the suit’s helmet. Even if that still had power and function after the damage it had taken, the vibration from it couldn’t possibly make it through the vacuum to Jimmy’s ears for whatever was inside to hear.

Dean should’ve known to forget about his definitions of possible, all things considered. It stopped walking when he spoke, head tilting in a way that would’ve looked curious if it had been less uncannily inhuman. Then its mouth opened, Jimmy’s mouth, and static crackled in Dean’s own comm. The noise built to a horrible, ringing screech, like the worst radio feedback he’d ever heard. He tried to block it out, but his hands were outside the helmet while his ears and the sound were inside. It didn’t work very well.

He didn’t have a weapon; they never did on survey missions. There were a lot of reasons for it that had made a lot of sense when Dean wasn’t facing down the shrieking, reanimated corpse of his best friend: Guns were incredibly rare on the _St. Louis_ , reserved for the governor and police chief in case of emergency, and hadn’t been seen or used at all in the twenty-five years of their voyage. Their purpose was peaceful and they were supposed to stay in the shuttle if they found even a hint of something that might be extraterrestrial life, which no one ever had. A gun wouldn’t have even worked in the oxygen-less space, but Dean wished he had something, anything to make him feel a little less like a sitting duck.

The light in Jimmy’s eyes dimmed slightly and the mouth closed, cutting off the painful noise. Before he could recover from the ringing left in his ears, it sent another prickle of static and then a voice, almost Jimmy’s but not, played over his comm speaker at regular volume.

“I’m sorry,” it said. “Your friend is dead. I apologize for desecrating his body and disturbing your grief, but you and your vessel are in danger.”

It advanced on him again and Dean scooted away until his back hit one of the jagged outcroppings of ice. Its words sounded harmless enough, even concerned, but that didn’t mean much when he had no idea what it was or what it wanted or if human tones of voice even applied.

And he couldn’t ignore that it was inside Jimmy’s corpse. Had it already been there when he ran? He hadn’t figured out how long he was out, or even, he realized with another sickening wrench, checked Jimmy’s vitals. All the shuttle’s non-emergency systems had shut down with the crash, and life support turned off on depressurization, so it wasn’t monitoring either of them. Dean didn’t actually confirm Jimmy’s death, he’d just seen the shattered helmet and—it should’ve been enough. In any other circumstance, it would’ve been.

But as it was, Dean found himself dwelling on what should have been another impossibility: that Jimmy might’ve still been alive when Dean had fled. Dean might’ve left him to what happened.

Jimmy would’ve picked up on Dean’s distress. Probably any human with a trace of empathy would’ve. The thing didn’t notice or didn’t care. “I can help you.” It held out a hand, just like Jimmy had countless times over the past twenty years; Dean didn’t take it.

“Stay away from me!”

The hand dropped and Jimmy’s brow creased at him. It matched up with a recognizable look of confusion or hurt, but it wasn’t Jimmy’s expression. Jimmy’s eyebrows went high, not low; his eyes went wide and his mouth went soft. It was the final proof he didn’t know he was waiting for that whatever was inside Jimmy definitely wasn’t Jimmy anymore and another wave of nausea threatened to turn his stomach inside out again.

“Get out of him.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t!”

Still shaky, feeling like he was going to be shaky for the rest of his life, Dean got his feet under him and managed to stand. The thing in Jimmy didn’t move closer, but it also didn’t move back, so Dean still ended up boxed in more than he would’ve liked, with that in front of him and a chest-high mound of icicles behind. Better than being trapped on the ground, at least.

“Don’t. Just stop it! Stop using him like a, a puppet, whatever you’re doing. Leave him.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Can’t or—”

“Listen to me,” it cut in, making Jimmy’s eyes flash again and static crackle over the comm briefly. The light was painfully bright, a sear that stayed in Dean’s vision even after it faded and only light from the distant sun reflected off the less distant planet remained. “Your friend is dead. Even were I to vacate his body, he couldn’t come back. And if I left, no matter how briefly, I couldn’t come back. I was lucky to reach you before his neural pathways were too damaged. I’m sorry, truly, but I can’t communicate with you without his form.”

“Why do you need to?” Dean asked, but even as he said it he remembered the first thing it had said after creeping up on him. “My ‘vessel’ is in danger? Too late for that warning. Remember that corpse you’re in?”

“Not the shuttle,” it said, grave like Jimmy never was, “the ship. The one carrying your whole society.”

If he hadn’t heard his pulse thundering in his ears, he would’ve thought his heart had stopped. It knew about the _St. Louis_. How? Had it been following them since then, did it have Jimmy’s memories, was it—

“What are you?”

It looked down over Jimmy’s body, the human body surrounded by an airtight suit it apparently didn’t need anymore, seeing as it was walking around with no helmet and no sign of being affected by the frozen vacuum. Then it raised its eyes back to Dean. Even without the glow, there was something unnatural in its gaze.

“My name is Castiel. I’m... The closest translation you have is a wavelength. We exist as energy, not a physical form like your kind. But we can imprint ourselves,” it explained, gesturing at its chest, “into suitable bodies. Suitable brain structures. It’s not something we do lightly, as the existing consciousness is destroyed.”

“Was...” Dean swallowed down the dryness in his throat. “Jimmy—”

Gravely, Castiel answered, “Your friend was gone. I would not have otherwise. But I’m searching for a fugitive from my society who is not so moral, who has caused great strife and many deaths—including, I believe, a number of your kind when he imprinted himself into the computer network of your ship.”

Suddenly Dean was grateful for the ice at his back, because it held him up when he sagged at that revelation. He wouldn’t have fallen, probably, but it saved him from a stumble he wasn’t sure he would’ve recovered from. Bracing himself with a hand on the nearest ice crystal, gripping it as hard as he could through the protective glove, he forced his next words out. They weren’t a question and were so quiet that they wouldn’t have been audible if Castiel were relying on the comm.

“The ‘freak’ energy wave,” he breathed. “The explosion.”

“You all remain in danger while he’s in control of the ship. Help me stop him.”

Somehow, despite having spent all that time being justifiably creeped out by talking to an alien in his best friend’s body, Dean still expected to see Jimmy when he got back to the shuttle. They’d been flying together for so long—but dwelling on it wouldn’t help anyone now. His eyes only lingered over the empty pilot’s chair for a few seconds before he moved on to the panel. The emergency indicator light was still blinking red and white, unanswered, but he turned up the volume on the ship’s speakers just in case.

“You said he’s on the ship,” he said, looking down at the screen where he was done adjusting things instead of back at Castiel. “That you can stop him. But I can’t even communicate with the _St. Louis_ right now, much less get back to it.”

“We will wait for them to respond to your beacon. I could get to them faster, but it would mean leaving both you and this body behind and I’ll need your help to navigate the _St. Louis_ and keep suspicion away while I subdue Uriel.”

Dean did look over then and had to force himself not to flinch away from how close Castiel was standing. “Okay, first of all, we organic life forms have a thing called personal space.”

Castiel’s head tilted to the side again, which struck Dean as odd for someone who was usually an incorporeal wavelength. It wasn’t a habit he’d picked up from Jimmy.

As Castiel took a step back, Dean continued, “Second, you want me to just, what, pretend you’re Jimmy? Bring an alien who’s taken over my friend’s dead body onto my ship, into my home, without telling anyone? We’ve never encountered extraterrestrial life, you know. You’re just—you’re asking me to take a lot on faith, here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Castiel, as gravely as when he’d apologized for using Jimmy. “I have no further proof to offer of my good intentions. But as you say, knowledge of my existence will cause too much of a stir. I can hide my presence from Uriel, but that won’t help if people talk about me where he can overhear.”

Dean tapped the distress beacon. “Well, none of that will be a problem if we aren’t rescued. And actually, even if we are,”—he waved at the shattered window, then Jimmy’s shattered helmet—“you being Jimmy and alive isn’t exactly plausible.”

Castiel frowned down at the helmet. “You don’t have any spares?”

“No.”

“I may be able to repair it. If I am, will you agree to my plan?”

Collapsing into the pilot’s chair, ignoring the feeling of wrongness—it had always been Jimmy’s, not his—Dean waved his acceptance. “Not like I have much choice at this point, right? But how are you going to do it? If it looks like it’s been cracked and fixed we still have the same problem.”

Castiel turned it over in his hands, then pointed to the window. “That is the same material. Will it matter if a small amount more of it is gone?”

“Not really. We’ll have to seal it the old-fashioned way anyway, the fact that it broke would’ve gone out with the distress signal info.” He wouldn’t ask. There was no point to asking. He asked, “Why?”

Castiel broke off a piece of the large window and held it to the shattered visor of his helmet. His eyes glowed, less blinding but longer lasting than when he’d just been doing it to shut Dean up. As Dean watched, the material softened and shifted and filled in the cracks; by the time Castiel’s eyes dimmed and he held up the helmet for Dean’s inspection, Dean couldn’t even tell where the hole had once been.

Together, because Dean only had two arms and they didn’t stretch the ten feet he would’ve needed to do it alone, they sealed the large window with a sheet of extra thick plastic stored away for such repairs.

“Wouldn’t hold in flight,” Dean said, “but it’ll let the system pump some air back in here.” He was glad to finally be able to remove his helmet and drink some water from his father’s flask. Rubbing at the well-worn curve of it, he sighed before tucking it away again. He’d have to look for Jimmy’s cloth Earth, but he wasn’t hopeful. Most likely it had been lost in the crash, sucked out through the shattered window. Small as it was, that loss compounded on top of everything else threatened to fill his eyes with tears.

“Stay here,” he told Castiel roughly, “poke around, see if you can figure out what went wrong with the computer, whatever. I need to go check on something.”

There wasn’t really anything to check; all they could do was sit back and wait, hoping the _St. Louis_ would come soon and they could see if Castiel was right. If an alien like Castiel really had been responsible for the energy surge that killed his parents, then what? It would be an answer, finally, but it wouldn’t change anything for him or Sam or Charlie or the rest of them. It sure as hell wouldn’t change anything for Jimmy.

Jimmy.

Shit.

It wasn’t as though he’d forgotten his best friend’s death. Couldn’t, when every time Castiel moved or spoke it was so different from how Jimmy did things that it had to remind him how Jimmy wasn’t Jimmy anymore. But since his first desperate flight from the crashed shuttle, he’d been too caught up in everything—meeting an actual alien, with all the bullshit involved in that, and getting the shuttle habitable again—that he hadn’t had a chance to really process it.

Staring at the narrow cot he and Jimmy traded off sleeping shifts in on longer survey missions, it hit him in all its devastating finality. Jimmy was dead. He’d never fly with him again, drink with him again, sit side by side and laugh over what the centuries-old comics on Dean’s infopad thought the future would look like. Just like his parents, Jimmy was gone forever from his life because of a single terrible accident. Not an accident, if Castiel could be believed. Did that make it better or worse?

Not better; he choked on his grief, struggling to breathe past it and knowing that Jimmy had died airless. Nothing would ever make that better. He sank onto the mattress, face in his hands, and stopped caring if he found Jimmy’s fucking globe. Mementos didn’t make the loss any easier. All of _St. Louis_ ’s orphans and widows knew that, and after the blowout they were all bereaved in one way or another. Even those who hadn’t lost family to the explosion had been cut off from loved ones on Earth, and everyone knew someone among the dead.

“I’m sorry for your bereavement.”

He hadn’t heard Castiel approach, but he was too drained to startle at the sudden nearness. Heaving a shuddering sigh that he told himself would be the last, Dean scrubbed a hand over his hair before looking up. Castiel’s crotch—Jimmy Novak’s crotch, in the middle of Dean mourning him—was right there in his face. Rather than try to explain again why Castiel should be standing more than half a foot away from him, Dean just tipped his head back further.

Jimmy’s eyes had never looked so solemn.

“Do you even know what that means?” The scratchiness of his own voice surprised him, but he pushed through it. “Can you—do your kind even die, or just...” He gestured vaguely, not entirely sure what he was going for.

Castiel said, “We can. I have also lost brothers, Dean. I know my use of this form causes you more suffering and I wish it could be otherwise.”

“It’s, uh. Yeah, it’s tough. I know you didn’t kill him or anything, but it’s—it’s fucked up. Fuck!”

Unable to sit there any longer, Dean jumped up. He had to twist to the side to avoid running into Castiel, but it was better than the alternative of pushing past the animated corpse that was the cause of his distress. He paced away from Castiel then spun back around.

“He’s dead. That’s messed up all on its own, but then you’re here and you look just like him, of course you do, but everything else is different and it’s messing me up. It’s gonna mess with your whole undercover plan, too, since no one who’s ever met Jimmy is gonna buy it. And that’s a lot of people, Jimmy is—fuck. Was.”

Dean had to look away before trying again. “Jimmy was a friendly guy.”

“Tell me about him.” The cot creaked as Castiel sat; Dean eyed him warily.

“Why?”

“Because it will help me know how to act. And,” he added, his deep version of Jimmy’s voice soft, “it sometimes eases the pain to remember the lost.”

Dean nodded, chewed his bottom lip, then nodded again and sat next to Castiel. It wasn’t quite like it had been with Jimmy the countless times they’d been in a similar position; he didn’t let his shoulder brush Castiel’s as he would have done with Jimmy, and he was uncomfortably aware of their proximity even so. But it was almost familiar, and as he filled the hours with stories from their shared childhood and beyond, as Cas traded them for his own life experiences, he found Cas was right.

It only lessened the ache of fresh loss a bit, but it was a bit that he was grateful for.

Eventually the day caught up with him and he couldn’t stop his yawns from interrupting every few words. Cas rose and motioned at the full length of the bunk.

“Rest,” he told Dean. “Even in an organic host, I do not require sleep.”

“Unlike food?”

Dean smiled at the grimace that earned him as Cas remembered forcing down one of the emergency rations. They weren’t the greatest introduction to eating, but they weren’t as bad as Cas made them out to be. “You’ll need to either enjoy real food more or learn to fake it, and sleeping, if we get back to the _St. Louis_.”

With another frown of distaste, Cas agreed, “One of the two, when ‘we’ are rescued. Sleep. I’ll wake you if your ship responds to your signal.”

They spent a while after he woke trading more questions and stories, then Dean sat Cas down with his infopad to try and catch up on human culture while Dean worked on what he could of the survey that was his actual mission. What he’d seen of the planet didn’t look like a good bet, but since the instruments still worked—since Jimmy had died for it—he’d fucking get the samples he could off its moon. The ice was interesting, at least; frozen water on the surface of the moon could mean liquid water nearby.

A laugh distracted him just when he was finishing up and he had to redo the last graph with only half his attention on the data. He tossed it aside a few seconds later and wandered over to drop next to Cas. The laugh had only lasted a breath, but it hadn’t been like Jimmy’s at all. He wanted to hear it again and figure out what made the difference. What made the alien make that sound.

“What’d you find?” he asked, leaning in to look at the screen over Cas’s arm. It was full of text that he didn’t get a chance to read before Cas scrolled past. That flashed avay in another blink, then again. “Whoa, Cas, hold on.”

Finger pausing mid-swipe, Cas turned his head. Their faces were very close together. “What is it?”

“What happened to the vids and stuff? If you’re looking for more, I can pull some up, it’ll be faster than searching through—” An assessing glance at the retained text turned into an awkwardly long double-take.

_...shivered as Nathan’s lips trailed down his neck and latched onto his nipple..._

While he was still staring, Cas said, “I’m able to process information very quickly. I finished the files you prepared for me, so now I’m reading through the library archives. I’m about halfway done, it will only be a few more minutes if you don’t mind waiting for our next meal. I find your mating habits fascinating.”

Despite being mortified at Cas finding and reading the dirty stories Dean had collected over the years—and there was no point in stopping him if he was already halfway through—Dean really did intend to correct him on their accuracy. But when he looked away from what Nathan’s mouth was doing, his eyes caught on another mouth and the words didn’t come.

He hadn’t—he and Jimmy had never. He’d never seen Jimmy that way; he wasn’t a bad-looking guy, but he was like a brother to Dean. When Dean had hit adolescence and started exploring his options, Jimmy had always been a wingman, not a potential partner. He’d never been attracted to Jimmy.

But Castiel wasn’t Jimmy. He didn’t act like Jimmy, didn’t carry himself like Jimmy, didn’t talk like Jimmy; sometimes, when Dean glanced over and found Cas staring at him like a puzzle, he didn’t even look like Jimmy. The air had sure as shit never felt so charged when Jimmy stood as close to him as Cas did—which had been almost never, at least not face to face.

“I’m gonna,” Dean said and fled to the bunk room. Cas didn’t follow and Dean didn’t sleep, but he stayed there with his back to the doorway for a few hours anyway.

Less than a half a day later, when Dean was pretending to work on the same data he’d already compiled three times in order to steadfastly ignore his sudden attraction to an alien in a body he’d never seen in that way before, the beacon sprang to life with a green light and a voice echoed through the ship. “—on our way. Shuttle Six, this is _St. Louis_ command. Novak, Winchester, acknowledge transmission. We’re on our way.”

Dean’s infopad fell to the floor as he jumped up, heart soaring with a hope he’d been so sure he would never feel again. “This is Winchester,” he answered, “fucking thrilled to hear it, sir.” Looking over his shoulder, he found Cas standing just behind him, watching and waiting. It was his last chance to go back on his decision to follow Cas’s plan. To lie to everyone he knew, everyone who had cared about Jimmy like he did.

To protect everyone else he cared about and finally get closure on his parents’ death.

The task might not be easy, but the decision was.

“We’ll be waiting right here, Command. Winchester and Novak out.”


End file.
